Tearing It Apart: A Review of Anna Gazmarian’s “The Sins of the Mother”

Micro Review of:
“The Sins of the Mother”
By Anna Gazmarian
The Sun, Issue 566
February 2023

I began going to therapy after a difficult postpartum. My therapist often read incomplete sentences aloud and asked me to fill in the blanks: I like [coffee]. I regret [my birth experience]. My greatest fear is [change]. A mother is [perfect].

In subsequent sessions, each time she read the sentence about the mother, I always responded with the word “perfect.”

Perhaps this is why I was so drawn to Anna Gazmarian’s “The Sins of the Mother,” an essay unpacking how the fear of falling short led to unrelenting anxiety during her transition to parenthood. Gazmarian, like me, was raised in an Evangelical Christian tradition that considered women separate but mostly equal, that spoke of Hell as a literal place, that equated certainty with salvation.

Gazmarian describes a childhood steeped in fear—not just of doing the wrong thing but of thinking the wrong thing too. Sin rooted at a fundamentally cognitive level. Her portrait of her childhood religion, though, is not entirely grim. Pain cohabited with joy: “Whenever I drive by local parks in summer,” she writes, “I reminisce about church picnics with tables filled with grilled food. And then I remember those events were also where I participated in skits about demons.”

Probing the possibility of finding healing and hope in the places one has been hurt is central here. Gazmarian’s story isn’t one of leaving religion, but of grappling with it, of shredding it into tiny pieces. The birth of her daughter offers Gazmarian an opening towards making something beautiful and new out of imperfect material, towards renegotiating her relationship with her faith and with herself. In the final image of the essay, “when no one was looking,” her daughter “grabs the petals” of a flower to study them, admire them, and eventually tears it apart and allows the petals to drift away. Her essay resists binary thinking—of Heaven and Hell, perfect and sinful—and instead challenges the reader to embrace the beauty and mystery in uncertainty and imperfection. We are, after all, humans that can simultaneously experience pain and pleasure.

To give birth to my son, my body had to open. I’d never encountered a vulnerability so raw as new motherhood. And as I detailed all my perceived failings under the low light in my therapist’s office, she helped me consider how and why I’d formed such rigid standards in the first place. She invited me to lean back and relax. Gazmarian’s essay allowed me to consider what it means to have faith without fixed answers, how to choose presence over perfection, and how to re-parent myself as I raise the next generation.

Anna Gazmarian’s (@anna_gazmarian) debut, Devout: A Memoir of Doubt is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in March 2024. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Rumpus, Longreads, and Quarterly West. She has essays forthcoming in The Sun Magazine and an anthology of personal essays by voices of the Armenian diaspora that is being published by University of Texas Press. She works for The Sun Magazine and lives with her family in Durham, NC.

Anna Rollins’s (@annajrollins) work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Electric Literature, and Joyland Magazine, among other outlets. She lives in Huntington, WV where she directs the writing center at Marshall University. Her reported memoir, Famished (forthcoming from Eerdmans), interrogates the intersection of purity culture and diet culture.